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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Blue" data-source="post: 9858713" data-attributes="member: 20564">To go off on a tangent, electric cars are interesting.Gasoline is a use-one substance.  Solar, wind, geothermal, and some other types of electrical generation are a harvest -- when the sun is out, when the wind is blowing, etc.  A drum of gasoline is usable for a set total distance.  An array of solar panels costing the same is unlimited over time.  With the recent advancement in photovoltaics and in chemical batteries (the big ones that the 100s-1000s+ of acres solar farms use), for much of the US based on latitude, it is the cheapest form of energy in terms of operating expenses (OEX).Batteries are crazy to make, agreed.  However, they are also really easy to recover the materials from.  There isn't yet a large scale EV battery recycling because there isn't the traffic for it yet.  With the exception of the early Dodge Leaf (which had a poorly designed battery with no thermal protection, etc.), most EVs are still using their original battery packs.  What we have are a tiny percentage replacements, more commercial use than personal, and vehicles that have been totaled.However, as there are more EVs, there will become a profitable market for battery recycling.  And battery use doesn't destroy any of the materials, it just forms molecular structures in it over time that impacts the ability to recharge.  We already, with today's tech, can recycle 98%+ of the rare material from those batteries to make new batteries.  We know how to take ore/old batteries and extract usable material from it.  So what we have now is growing pains, not a permanent issue.Oh, I mentioned solar and some people don't like that it "takes up space".  Right now in the US there is a mandate for 10% ethanol in gasoline.  We make it from corn because of, well, politics.  Things like sugar beats (or specific algae IIRC) would be much better sources.  But turning land that is currently making corn to feed into cars (which is also a nasty process to convert to ethanol) and instead making it solar farms in the same places that previously grew corn-for-ethanol like Iowa and Illinois (which are not the best places for solar via latitude, but are still decent) will result in orders of magnitudes more miles per year available than the miles-of-driving the corn ethanol was providing.  So just converting existing space already used to move vehicles can provide so much more.Yeah, this undermines my point about the impact of building meta glasses for your character sheet, but the power infrastructure technology has been making rapid strides in both generation and storage of electricity, and that makes electric cars really interesting.  Renewable power is a big political point in some countries, but because we have simply come to the point that it will generate larger profits than other energy generation will mean that it will come.</blockquote>

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